Sculpture Model

I’ve added a new sculpted model to the shapeways shop. It’s available in 2 sizes: 12cm and 20cm high. I’ll talk a bit about it below.

So I’ve been working on developing the workflow needed to build this robot. So how to model the overall shape and then how the various muscles and bones will fit into it. A sort of robotic embryogenesis! As this is a lot of tinkering around without much to show I decided to take a few bits of what I’ve been learning (for this and generally through freelancing) and turn it into a sculpture.

I took a model from makehuman and modified it to be more aesthetically pleasing. I then started sculpting into it, using blender. This reminds me that I should really get on with practising in Zbrush! I mainly sculpted in the superficial muscles in and worked on ‘mechanising’ the bones and anchor positions. I added the facial muscles and around the fingers.

I then posed it into a more natural pose and cleaned up the posed model. I then decimated it until it was suitable for 3D printing via shapeways. I also made a version that could be sliced up and printed on my form 2 printer.

I cleaned it up and began to paint it. I started with an airbrush covering in humbrol acrylic primer. I then sanded and cleaned up any more details that weren’t visible in the white print material. A second and third layer of primer followed. Then a coating of satin black. After that I used a brush to add the metallic gold and aluminium colours, and matt white. I went with a gold and black feel inspired by Deus Ex Human Revolution. I added some contour shading, that I’d seen done on some warhammer 40k painting guides. It might have been a good idea to use oil paints to get a good blend, but I didn’t want to spend more time painting. Here are some more of the painted pictures.